Face­book re­port­edly plan­ning to build a huge new data cen­tre in Den­mark

Face­book is plan­ning to build its third data cen­tre out­side the US in Den­mark, ac­cord­ing to lo­cal news site fyens.dk.

The so­cial me­dia gi­ant is re­port­edly look­ing to build a fa­cil­ity with three server halls in an in­dus­trial area near Odense, which is Den­mark's third largest city.

Up to 1,200 jobs could be cre­ated dur­ing the con­struc­tion of the data cen­tre, fyens.dk wrote in a fol­low up ar­ti­cle yes­ter­day. Con­struc­tion ef­forts will re­port­edly be led by Bri­tish firm Mace.

The 500,000 square me­ter con­struc­tion site was re­port­edly ac­quired by Cassin Net­works Aps, said to be owned by Face­book, for 68 mil­lion DKK ($10 mil­lion), with the money go­ing to the mu­nic­i­pal­ity of Odense.

A fence was re­port­edly put up around the site at the end of last week and the area is now being mon­i­tored by se­cu­rity.

The re­port from fyens.dk states that the data cen­tre in Den­mark will be even larger than Face­book's $450 mil­lion data cen­tre in Lulea, Swe­den, which opened in 2013.

Data cen­tres are vi­tal to Face­book, which is deal­ing with an in­creas­ing amount of in­for­ma­tion on its plat­form. These huge server farms are used to com­pute and process the ac­tions taken by Face­book's bil­lions of users around the world ev­ery day.

The news will likely come as a blow to other Euro­pean coun­tries like Ice­land which have been try­ing tempt Sil­i­con Val­ley giants to build their data cen­tres on their shores in a bid to cre­ate jobs and at­tract in­vest­ment.

A Face­book spokesper­son said: "We have not made any fi­nal de­ci­sion to come to Den­mark. It takes years to get a site ready for a new data cen­tre, and be­cause of the long lead time, we're al­ways eval­u­at­ing po­ten­tial new lo­ca­tions as we ex­pand our global in­fra­struc­ture. By do­ing work up­front, we can move fast when we do need more ca­pac­ity. But, we're not committing to any­thing right now.